


The Discovery of Martin's World

by Zarkonnen



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Crossover
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-12
Updated: 2015-04-12
Packaged: 2018-03-22 13:49:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3731206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zarkonnen/pseuds/Zarkonnen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Did you say 'Dragons'?"</p>
<p>Miles reached for the coffee bulb and took a rather sizeable gulp.</p>
<p>When a long-lost wormhole reopens, a strange world of dragons and warring feudal kingdoms is discovered. Anxious to stop the Cetagandans from adding it to their empire, the emperor of Barrayar sends his top operative to make contact with the natives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Discovery of Martin's World

"Did you say 'Dragons'?"

Miles reached for the coffee bulb and took a rather sizeable gulp.

"That's what orbital recon suggests, yes", said Captain Vorsouza.

Miles shot Gregor an exasperated look. Gregor was looking suspiciously blank. Was this all an elaborate prank? Miles had pegged Vorsouza as the serious type, dry even for an ImpSec analyst. But maybe this was all wrong. He hadn't forgotten Gregor's birthday, right? Of course not, it was last month, and it was hardly possible to miss the Emperor's birthday on Barrayar. Especially when, like Miles, you'd been stuck at home, near-dissolving from boredom. He'd returned to Barrayar hot from his most recent success, a daring raid on some Jacksonian smugglers, executed perfectly. And with perfect deniability for Barrayar, too. The Dendarii's official employer had been Pol, who had plenty of their own reasons to want the smugglers hunted down.

Miles returned to the present. A briefing room, not in the bowels of ImpSec for once, but in the Imperial Residence itself. Wood panelling, comfy chair, even biscuits had been provided. No Simon Illyan, which made the whole thing even stranger. He usually liked to be in the room when Miles got sent off, out into the galaxy at large.

"Dragons."

"Yes. Not many of them, a few dozen at most. Huge ones, though. And thermal imaging suggests that they're flesh and blood creatures. Though there's some debate on that, I note."

"Genetic engineering?"

The obvious and unpleasant answer here was Cetagandans. Their fondness for outrageous genetic engineering might extend to dragons. Though it seemed... unsubtle for the Haut geneticists.

"We assume. It, er, seems unlikely that they'd have evolved naturally. In fact, we think the whole planet has been terraformed pretty thoroughly at some time in the past."

Gregor stirred. "Not Cetagandans, then? Too long ago?" Evidently he'd been thinking along the same lines.

"It seems likely. We're really just going off a few orbital probes right now. The wormhole is still stabilizing, and it will be weeks before we can send any manned ship through safely. Our best guess right now is that it was terraformed and then cut off from the nexus."

"And there's no sign of advanced industry." Gregor put in, clearly having decided to abandon his earlier blankness. "Thermals suggest they might have horses. Much like the Time of Isolation. Much like Barrayar."

"Barrayar with dragons." Miles replied, aware that he was still stuck on the dragons aspect.

"Like Barrayar pre-contact. And what's more, it's halfway between here and Rho Ceti."

Miles realized what Gregor was getting at. If the Cetagandans hadn't yet found the reopening wormhole, they surely would soon. On the other side, they would find a new world ripe for conquest. They might well see it as a chance for a do-over of their conquest of Barrayar. Miles' homeworld had had decades of exposure to the technologies and attitudes of the modern wormhole nexus before the invasion. This new planet, provisionally dubbed Martin's World, would have nothing of the sort. The Cetas could sweep in, bottle them up entirely, and subjugate the planet at their leisure. No heroic Prince Xav for them, travelling the nexus, mustering sympathy and support.

And for Barrayar, beyond the painful historical parallels, this would eat up valuable buffer between the two empires, giving the Cetagandans a base from which to strike with little warning. And who knew what connections existed beyond this new wormhole? What possibilities for further expansion, or even a backdoor into Barrayaran space? Of course, the Barrayaran astrometric service had long mapped out local space to guard against such backdoors, but if Miles remembered his academy courses correctly, it was possible, if rare, for a small wormhole to be only properly visible from one end of the link...

"... and that's why we're sending you."

Miles started. Clearly, he had missed some crucial bit of information. Not enough coffee yet.

"Uh, why?"

Gregor glanced at Vorsouza meaningfully.

"We could station three fast cruisers next to the wormhole mouth in a bit more than a day. Add another half-dozen heavier ships within the week. Begin construction of a military station soon after. If we wanted to make it really obvious to the Cetagandans what was going on. If we wanted to provoke them. Which we really don't. Right now, officially, we know nothing about this wormhole, and doubly nothing about what's beyond this."

_That's_ why this meeting wasn't at ImpSec.

"Our best hope," Gregor continued, "is to contact the locals and get them to accept some sort of..." - he waved his hands, indicating vagueness - "...vassalage, defensive pact, mutual aid treaty. Anything that lets us start shifting assets into the system, and get some locals out, and onto the galactic stage, proclaiming their existence and lack of interest in becoming new new Ninth Satrapy of Cetaganda."

Miles carefully avoided pointing out that this plan pretty much involved the planet becoming a Barrayaran "Satrapy", and instead settled for:

"Does Illyan know about this?"

"Yes. He does, as well as a silo of analysts at ImpSec that have been assigned to the case. ImpSec at large, and everyone else, knows nothing. Uh, your father does, of course. They're not here because we're being supremely careful this time. An extraordinary meeting might get noticed by the wrong people, and right now, officially, nothing is happening."

Vorsouza cleared his throat. "You _are_ due to meet with him day after tomorrow. He has already requested the Ariel detached from the Dendarii fleet, and you'll be given the details of your rendez-vous at that point."

Gregor's face went blank again, and he reclined. The meeting was over. Miles realized he was still clutching his coffee bulb.

\---

Daenerys stumbled and nearly fell over, again. Somewhere, over her, she could hear Drogon circling. She no longer bothered shielding her eyes from the sun to look up for him. Her belly was spasming near-constantly now, and the effort of moving her legs was bad enough. She concentrated on putting one foot after the other.

A strange low whistling sound rose in the distance, somewhere in the sky. Seconds later, she could hear Drogon screeching, flapping frantically. The whistling sound changed, became louder, deeper, more ragged. Drogon bellowed. Was he in pain? She looked up and saw the dragon, tangled with some impossible flying thing, a silver box with wings.

Smoke was pouring from the side of the box, and as she watched, it dipped lower, banked, and then went into a glide just feet above the ground. Drogon was still flapping with one wing, screeching, tearing at its side. The whistling sound cut out and the box plowed into a low rise less than a hundred yards away. Daenerys, who had been rooted to the spot for the whole scene, obeyed a sudden instinct and threw herself flat on the ground.

More sounds of dragon's fury from ahead, suddenly cut off by a series of humming, crackling sounds. Then, silence, only interrupted by a periodic pinging. Daenerys looked up and saw the back of the box open up. Two figures emerged, one much shorter than the other. Both dressed in drab grey clothes. They briefly conferred, then began walking towards her. She tried to stand up, and eventually managed. Her fingers had curled around a fist-sized rock. The sun was in her eyes, but she could see Drogon motionless - dead - lying next to the silver box. Some kind of sky-chariot, or an artificial dragon made of steel? Whatever it was, it had killed the one thing she had left in this world. Her fingers tightened, and her gaze returned to the mismatched pair approaching her.

The one on the left was a dwarf. The Lannister dwarf? She had heard of him, and his cunning, and cruelty. As he stepped up to her, hands spread out, she seized her moment and smashed the rock against his temple.

The last thing she saw was the dwarf crumpling and twitching, before another humming, crackling sound took her consciousness.

\---

Elli Quinn was not having a good day. After weeks mostly stuck in orbit, studying the planet below, trying to make sense of its language and culture and power structures with a fraction of the necessary resources, they had received a tightbeam message this morning: Cetagandan fleet movements. It was now very likely that they knew about the new wormhole. When the Ariel passed through, it had still been so small and unstable that the ship's pilot nearly passed out from exhaustion after the jump. Now it was likely big enough to admit serious warships, and it was just that kind of ship that had been observed making non-routine jumps out of Rho Ceta space.

Of course, this message, delivered by courier and tightbeam, while still trying to conceal the wormhole's existence, was woefully out of date. Miles, who she suspected had been getting up in the middle of the night to read more reports and language analyses, went into overdrive at the news. In a rapidly convened meeting, he overrode all concerns and pronounced that it was time for direct contact.

They'd found this one a few days earlier. They knew, from their enquiries and analyses that most people on the planet thought dragons were extinct. They also knew that it was supposedly possible to ride dragons, and that anyone who did so would be considered a great leader, material for a great king to reunite the planet's warring factions. When they first arrived, they had hoped to find some central power structure to ally themselves with, but this turned out not to be the case at all. Of the planet's two inhabited continents, one was peppered with quarrelling city-states and raiders, and the other one had just embarked on the second major civil war in as many generations.

Miles had brought with him a cadre of linguists and social scientists culled (in one case, she suspected, abducted) from the top universities on Komarr. There were no radio communications to intercept and study, so they immediately took to sending down the Ariel's two dropships to remote areas, ideally on cloudy days. A fruitful cooperation soon developed between the scientists and Corporal Voroufakis, the ImpSec surveillance specialist, who would set up long-range directional microphones that could pick up the individual conversations in market towns half a kilometre away. Their big breakthrough came one week in. In the remains of a fort that had been recently razed by one of the civil war's factions, they found a sizeable library. Miles, who was already bouncing off the walls at that point, took credit for sending down that dropship into such an unstable area.

With the help of the library, linguistic computer models soon bloomed, and rapid language acquisition courses could be synthesized. Miles took to them voraciously, and Quinn followed suit, happy that they had something concrete to sink his teeth into. Preliminary analyses of the social and power structures soon followed, and a rather disheartening picture emerged: Compared to Barrayar at the end of the Time of Isolation, this planet was vastly more backwards and less united. With some exceptions, the place was a feudal hell-hole. (Miles made a face when she called it that.) The western continent had been more or less united under a dynasty called the Targaryens until a few decades ago, but a rebellion by local lords had put a new king on the throne, who had singularly failed to consolidate his reign. With his death, the lords immediately started fighting one another.

In the meetings, everyone agreed that the only way to sufficiently unify the place before the Cetagandans arrived was to find one of those Targaryens and put him or her on the throne, backed by as much flim-flam, promises, sweet words, and orbital weaponry as necessary. Back in their cabin, Miles had a rather different analysis:

"At this rate, we might as well be the Cetagandans."

She made a move to calm him, but he got up out of bed and started pacing.

"I can see it now. Some kind of Ghem-general in high orbit looking down on Barrayar, going..." - and there he lapsed into a surprisingly accurate Cetagandan accent - "As you can see, the natives are violent barbarians. They need a strong ruling hand to keep them out of trouble."

The first part of that sounded accurate enough to her, but she knew by now that Miles, just like all the other Barrayarans involved from the Emperor on down, had latched on to Martin's World as some kind of symbol of their homeworld. In fact, she had the distinct impression that the whole planet had become one huge spherical damsel in distress to Miles. As for her, she'd read the strategic analyses. She didn't want the Cetagandans to swallow up yet another world, either. But they were getting so damn _emotional_ about the whole thing.

Two days later, thermals picked up a dragon flying on coast of the eastern continent. And something else too, a small but just about detectable extra mass: a dragonrider. Was this to be their Targaryen, the puppet ruler they'd convinced themselves they needed? After weeks of impatience, Miles now dithered. They had a row about it, or perhaps just because they'd been cooped up on their tiny overpopulated ship for too long.

"If it wasn't for that I promised Gregor", Miles finally admitted, "I would give the order to jump out of here. There's nothing we can do to help these people in the few weeks or months before the Cetagandans arrive. We will get blood on our hands, and not much else."

They went to bed, and when they woke up again, the tightbeam message had arrived. The Cetagandans were on the move. Miles called an emergency meeting.

"It's just going to be Elli and me," he insisted.

"Admiral, with all due respect, that's absurd. We have a whole squad ready to escort you." The whole Naismith-Vorkosigan distinction had been in serious danger of breaking down, but Voroufakis at least remembered how to play his role properly.

"That's far too many people, and far too many guns. This first contact needs to be between equals."

"So what you're saying is that this Targaryen has a dragon, and you've got me?" Elli quipped.

"You, and a stunner, and a plasma arc. More than enough. It's time to meet the locals."

Well, Miles had certainly met the locals, whose traditional greeting evidently included a rock to the head. Funny, none of the scientists ever mentioned that one in the briefings. Having dropped the bedraggled-looking girl with her stunner, she switched it off, quickly bent down to Miles and put its handle between his chattering teeth. The head wound looked superficial, but it had clearly set off one of his seizures. Miles, still convulsing, shot her a look of embarassed gratitude.

Once it looked like his seizure had mostly subsided, she picked him up and carried him back to the dropship, grateful for the relatively weak gravity of Martin's World. Next, she fetched the dragon woman - girl. There was not much to her. Her once-beautiful blue gown was tattered, her astoundingly light blonde hair a matted mess, and she distinctly stank. Elli almost felt sorry for her, but still made sure to strap her down on a dropship bench. Miles would probably have disapproved in the interests of diplomacy, but Miles was out cold right now.

Time to survey the damage. They had known about the dragon, obviously, but they had not expected it to attack the dropship. Stupid, in retrospect. It had taken quite a lot of stunner bolts to get the monster to stop thrashing. Now it slept uneasily, twitching limbs making the ship's frame shake gently. She confirmed that even if she managed to get its talons out of where they'd torn straight through the hull, the breach was too extensive to repair in a way that would hold up in suborbital flight. She moved to the cockpit, sat down in the pilot's seat with a sigh, and keyed the comm channel to the Ariel.

"Quinn here."

"We hear you. Everything all right?" Great. Voroufakis. Telemetry would have told him a while ago that things were not all right at all, but to his credit, he sounded concerned rather than impatient.

"We got attacked by a dragon on the way down. Ship's out of commission. How soon can you get the other one down here?"

"Uh, we have to close it back up first. Half an hour? But listen, is it safe? Thermals say there's two other dragons less than fifty clicks away."

"Voroufakis. Get the ship down. As soon as possible. Full squad. I have a half-stunned dragon down here, and I'd like some backup by the time it wakes up."

"Thirty minutes it is then. Voroufakis out."

It was standard procedure to keep the other dropship on alert, but they had been doing so many drops in the past weeks that the ships kept on needing maintenance. Which meant that instead of a five minute emergency drop, it was going to be a leisurely half hour as the techs aborted their work, sealed the ship back up, got it fueled and loaded, and sent it on its way. At least by that time, Miles would be up and running again. And the dragon?

She returned to the back of the ship and carefully made her way past the claws still embedded in the hull, gently twitching. She did not want to wake the dragon. Just to make sure, she switched out her half-empty stunner energy pack for a new one, and then went to attend her two charges in the back. Miles, lying on a bench opposite the girl's, was just starting to wake up. She handed him a water bulb and a packet of meds, which he accepted gracefully.

He glanced over to the girl. "She OK?", he mumbled.

"Yeah, just stunned. Well, and dehydrated and kind of sick-looking, but we can do something about that as soon as the other dropship arrives."

Miles drifted for a moment, then asked "When?"

"Inside half an hour."

"Oh, good."

For a moment, she thought he was going to pass out again, but he was merely gathering his strength. Slowly, he sat up, taking in the interior of the ship's main room. Benches were installed on the side, equipped with straps to hold troops in place during combat drops. Further ahead were storage lockers for equipment and weapons, and a passage to the cockpit. The twitching dragon claws embedded in the outer wall were a nonstandard addition. Looking the other way, he could see that the ship's hatch was still open, affording a view onto the dusty plain where they had crashed. A few shrubs bordered a tiny rivulet, and beyond that was a slow rise. And above that rise, there was a great plume of dust.

Elli's eyes had been following his, and she frowned at the sight of the dust plume.

"S'horses, I think. The dust. Coming closer."

Elli swore.

"I'm going to have a look. You stay here, OK?"

She unholstered her plasma arc and stepped out of the ship, ready to face this new menace, and slice it in half if needed.


End file.
